[Tom
Lehrer, one of the funniest—and wittiest, not to mention most irreverent—satirical
songwriters and singers ever to grace an American stage (or record album), died
at 97 at his home in Boston on 26 July 2025.
I was a fan, and so was my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor
to Rick
On Theater, who composed a tribute to the comical math teacher. (Now, there’s an unlikely label!) Kirk, it
should be noted, is a composer, musician, and songwriter.
[If
any reader doesn’t know Tom Lehrer, who stopped performing in 1967, check him
out on one of the many videos posted to YouTube and other platforms (Kirk has
included links to some of them in his homage), and, if you can catch it when it
airs occasionally, PBS has a recording of Lehrer’s 1967 concert in Copenhagen. (It was airing in the past weeks, but it may no
longer be in the schedule. It returns from
time to time for multiple broadcasts, however.)
[Following
Kirk’s profile of Lehrer, I’ve appended the New York Times obituary of Lehrer. It’s pretty comprehensive in the background
and biographical details of the songwriting college professor. (There’s a link to another obit in Kirk’s tribute
as well.)]
TOM LEHRER AND THE
COMIC SPIRIT
by Kirk Woodward
Are
you a Tom Lehrer (1928-2005) enthusiast, or had you not heard of him until you
read his
obituary earlier this year? Not everyone knows about him, but Tom and I go
a long way back.
My
first encounter with his music occurred decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky, at
the house of my best friend, Jay Paradis. One afternoon in the early 1960s, when
his parents weren’t home, Jay opened the big record cabinet in the living room
and showed me and a few others his parents’ collection of “party records.”
Today
that might mean “dance music.” In those days it was the name for record albums
that were considered off-color or at least disreputable, like those of Redd Foxx (1922-1991). One of those records showed a side view of an audience in an
auditorium, with a spotlight singling out a distant figure on stage at a piano.
The
album was An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (Lehrer Records, 1959). At first
listening I was a fan for life. There was nothing “dirty” about the songs; but
there was plenty of parody, sardonic humor, cheerful melodies played cheerfully
on the piano, and funny, perfectly crafted lyrics.
One
of the things that impressed me most was that although I didn’t know much about
the types of songs he parodied, I knew immediately what those songs had to be
like. As it turned out I was right.
Oxford
Languages defines a “cult figure” as “a writer, musician, artist, or other
public figure who is greatly admired by a relatively small audience or is
influential despite limited commercial success.” In this sense Lehrer is a cult
figure, but he’s a major cult figure, if there is such a thing.
Fairly
often I’ll mention him in conversation, and either the other person has no idea
what I’m talking about, or we begin a vigorous round of quotations from
Lehrer’s songs:
“Once the rockets go up, who cares
where they come down?
“That’s not my department,” says Wernher
von Braun.
He loved to burn down houses just to
watch the glow,
And nothing could be done, ‘cause he
was the mayor’s son.
Hurl that spheroid down the field,
and fight, fight, fight!
That
last quotation is from the football song “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” which Lehrer
wrote while he was at Harvard (he was admitted at the age of 15), one of numerous
times he combined the popular and the highly intelligent. Just thinking about the
song’s title makes me laugh.
Although
he rated a lengthy obituary in the New York Times (see below) Lehrer
still falls, barely, in the “cult figure” category, a fact he doesn’t seem to
have minded much. He estimated a few years ago that he had sold about two
million records in his career, not a shabby number for a performer who introduced
only three albums of original material (in six different releases) containing
36 songs.
Altogether
as far as we know he wrote around 50 songs. His music is regularly re-released
in some form or other. The most comprehensive collection, if one can get one’s
hands on it, is the three CD collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer issued
in 2000 by Rhino Entertainment, which includes four songs Lehrer wrote after
his performing career was basically over.
That
performing career was brief. Fortunately he can be seen on YouTube. A YouTube
channel called “Silly Songs with Lehrer” provides a number of
interviews with Lehrer.
Lehrer can also be seen
in concert,
ironically enough performing not in the United States, but in Copenhagen (the
availability of the full concert is erratic, but individual songs from it are
also there).
He
was nearly at the end of his performing career when he gave that concert (1967);
he accepted the invitation because he’d always wanted to see Scandinavia.
What
is it about those songs of his, then? Why is it that we’re still listening to
and enjoying them (I am, anyway) some seventy years or so after they were first
performed, and that few of them have “dated?”
Lehrer’s
songs can be categorized, loosely, as jolly mockeries and novelty numbers. His mockeries
often take the sentimental songs of yesteryear and give them new and often
grotesque contexts. They are not parodies in the sense that they put new words
to existing melodies like Allan Sherman (1924-1973); his parody,
or perhaps more accurately his “burlesquing” of the originals, lies in the
lyrics, not necessarily in the music.
An
example is the song “The Old Lamp-Lighter” (1946, music by Nat Simon, lyrics by
Charles Tobias), an allegedly nostalgic look at a still earlier era. Lehrer,
not very subtly, wrote “The Old Dope Peddler” “with his powdered happiness.”
(I
mention this song because, as he has acknowledged, when he wrote it “dope” was
not a major factor in most lives. Today the drug culture is much more
prevalent, and the song now has an unintended resonance.)
Another
song, “The Masochism Tango,” mocks a kind of song best represented perhaps by
“So in Love,” a ballad by Cole Porter (1891-1964) from the great musical Kiss
Me Kate (1948):
So
taunt me, and hurt me,
Deceive
me, desert me,
I’m
yours till I die . . .
Lehrer’s song, again not terribly subtly, piles up
the number of things the
singer will allow the loved one to do:
Bash in my brain,
And make me scream with pain,
Then kick me once again,
And say we’ll never part . . .
There
are songs about college, an Irish ballad (in which things go very, very badly),
a Western number, a number about the Old South, about the Army . . . whatever
caught his attention.
The
novelty numbers are varied and imaginative. The best known, perhaps, is “The
Elements,” a rearranging of the periodic table that Lehrer set to “A Modern
Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance:
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum,
selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen
and rhenium . . .
(Lehrer
said his one experience on stage was playing the Pirate King in a production of
Pirates in high school. The music of Gilbert and Sullivan was always
important to him.)
(Arthur
Sullivan (music; 1842-1900) and W. S. Gilbert’s [libretto; 1836-1911]
The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty is a comic
opera in two acts. Its official première was in New York City in 1879,
where it ran 100 performances and was well received by both audiences and
critics. Its 1880 London début
ran for 363 performances.)
Also
in the novelty category are the songs he wrote for the United States version of
the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was
(National Broadcasting Company, 1963-1965), and the ten songs he wrote
for the educational TV program The Electric Company (Public Broadcasting
Service, 1971-1977), devoted to helping children learn to read. (Lehrer
remarked that he never found out if it worked.) The variety of his output is
impressive, considering the relatively small number of songs he wrote.
I
never met Tom Lehrer, although I wrote him a fan letter, and I’ve only met one
person who did, an actor in the revue Tomfoolery (1980 in London, 1981
in New York City). I asked the actor what Lehrer was like, and he said, quoting
Lehrer, “There’s a ‘p’ in ‘park.’”
For
a person with a disapproving world view, Lehrer appears to have been
good-humored and sociable. In interviews he speaks of friends and parties. He
put his home address on his first albums, so people could write him for
additional copies.
His
number was in the Boston phone book for years after he became known. His stage
persona was convivial, if sardonic. He was hardly a recluse or antisocial.
Instead,
it seems clear that he was what the psychological approach Family Systems
Therapy calls “self-differentiated,” that is, he knew what he was and what he
wasn’t, and acted accordingly. He lived
his life pretty much the way he wanted to and didn’t feel compelled to behave
in the ways that some celebrities feel they must.
And
he was a teacher most of his life, a profession that by necessity involves
working with people. There is a definite element of teaching in his material.
In a way every good artist is a teacher, introducing us to aspects of the world
that we may not have been aware of before.
He
taught undergraduate mathematics at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. At the latter
school he also instituted and taught a class on musical theater, because he
found that students didn’t know who Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) was. He
considered Sondheim the greatest lyricist ever. (Curiously, he and Sondheim
attended the same summer camp as children from 1937 to 1939.)
Sometimes
Lehrer makes the connection with teaching explicit. Two of his songs are
“That’s Mathematics” and “New Math.” And any comedian in some way wants to
teach us about life. Lehrer was – as much as he was a mathematician – a comedian.
I
called this article “Tom Lehrer and the Comic Spirit,” and what I have in mind
is a comment by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) that “comedy is disruption.”
Not all disruption is comedy – tragedy is disruption, too, but its rhythm is
different. In comedy the disruption comes suddenly.
(For
more on Shaw, see “Bernard
Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” by Kirk Woodward [5 September 2012],
“Two
Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012]. “Eric
Bentley On Bernard Shaw” by Kirk Woodward [3 December 2015], “Re-Reading Shaw” by Kirk
Woodward [3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016], and “Shaw
versus Shakes” by Kirk Woodward [8 September 2023].)
Lehrer’s
songs often set up expectations and then disrupt them. I wonder if the songs above,
as described, struck anyone as cheap or facile. It’s a fact that, particularly
at first, Lehrer often got his effects by taking a subject and introducing
murder or death in it, to disruptive effect.
This
kind of disruption of expectation would certainly get a laugh at parties, which
is where he first performed his songs. But does it have anything to do with
art, or is it just a way of getting cheap laughs?
There
are two answers to this question. The first is that Lehrer’s lyrics are
invariably matched by lilting, pleasurable melodies that give the songs a
higher dimension. Lehrer is in control of this matchup because he almost always
writes both words and music.
In
an interview he notes that he and the composer and singer Randy Newman (b.
1943) both “take some sardonic attitude and set it to very pleasant music.”
It’s notable that a major influence on his songs was the jaunty group of patter
songs of Noel Coward (1899-1973), who does much the same thing.
He
began playing piano when he was eight. He had a vigorous, percussive style and
he knew his way around a keyboard. For proof, visit the song “(Oh, My Darling) Clementine” (traditional, with 1884 lyrics attributed
to Percy Montrose [fl. 1880s]) in which he plays that chestnut in the styles of
Cole Porter, Mozart (1756-1791), bebop jazz (flourished, 1945-1955), and
Gilbert and Sullivan. Note in particular how well he understands
the bebop style.
His
lyrics too, regardless of the subject, are skillfully crafted. I learned more
about writing song lyrics from Lehrer’s songs than from any other place. They
set a high standard; they fit their melodies, they move along smoothly, they
suit their subjects perfectly, and they are funny.
The
songs he wrote for The Electric Company are practically a textbook in
lyric writing, for example in his demonstration of “Silent E:”
Who can turn a cap into a cape?
Who can turn a tap into a tape?
A little glob becomes a globe
instantly,
If you just add Silent E.
He turned a dam – Alikazam! – into a
dame
But my friend Sam stayed just the
same.
(In
“Tomfoolery” he added:
Once I had to hop, now I can hope,
And of course my pop is now the
Pope.)
A
second answer to the question about the ultimate value of his work is that by
his approach Lehrer calls into question the comfortable, comforting nature of
earlier songs and, by implication, of earlier social conditions.
Some
of his songs directly challenge staples of Fifties life – Christmas (“A
Christmas Carol”), segregation (“I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”), nuclear armament
(“We All Will Go Together When We Go”). Others simply raise a little hell.
In
effect, then, his music is an event on the way to the consequential change that
begins to flower in the 1960s. Just by their disruptive nature, the songs helped
set the stage for attitudes of rebellion that are now commonplace.
I
don’t know if he thought so; usually he talks about his songs as pure
entertainment. Very little in entertainment is pure, though, and his songs
provided an alternative way of looking at a lot of things for people like me,
huddled around a record player in the Fifties.
Lehrer
has said that his aim with his songs was not to change anyone’s mind, since
anyone who heard him perform agreed with him already. He just “titillated the
audience,” he said.
Two
comments, again, on this way of thinking: it leaves out the effect of his work
on people like me who heard it for the first time, and it ignores the way that
art can change perceptions not as much by what it says as about how it says it.
When
he turned his songwriting attention to political affairs, writing for That
Was the Week that Was, he demonstrated that at a minimum he could raise
awareness:
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must
beware,
Don’t drink the water and don’t
breathe the air.
A
common misconception about Lehrer is that he hated performing. He didn’t, as
long as the performing was for a purpose. He wanted people to hear his songs,
and as he pointed out, after a while everyone at Harvard had heard them “ad
nauseam,” so he began to perform them more widely, also, in the process,
polishing them so they were ready for recording, another way of getting people
to hear them.
But
he didn’t see the point of performing for people who already knew his music. He
accepted some tour dates in Europe because he wanted to see Scandinavia, but
once his fundamental purpose had been met – to introduce his music to people –
he mostly stopped performing.
A
similar misconception is that he stopped writing songs. He didn’t; he has said
in interviews that he continued writing occasional pieces, including verses for
friends. In the Remains collection are four songs that were written
after the original six albums.
A
YouTube video provides several
examples,
as well as a cheerful look at the man himself.
But
it’s true that 1965 saw his final original album release. Why no more? He has
said it’s because he had nothing else to say, but I would guess there’s more
involved. David Byrne (b. 1952), formerly the lead singer of Talking Heads and
a remarkable artist, gives a clue in his book How Music Works (Three
Rivers Press, 2012/2017). Byrne writes that
context largely determines what is written,
painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. . . . We unconsciously and instinctively
make work to fit pre-existing formats. Of course, passion can still be present.
Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and
opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there),
it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and
emotional materials usually find a way in . . . . Opportunity and availability
are often the mother of invention.
Lehrer’s
performance career illustrates Lynch’s point clearly. The musical culture in
the early 1950s, and society at large at that time, provided the context for
many of his songs. That culture and that society changed, and with it the
“formats” he had drawn on for his songs changed as well. The material for his
music was no longer there.
Mathematics,
he said, provided a continuing way of looking at the world, it was his first
interest, and he enjoyed spending his time there. He continued to listen to
music, or try to. I am happy to report that he admired the Beatles.
Wikipedia’s article on Lehrer
reports a wonderful episode in his later years:
In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song “The Old Dope Peddler“ on his debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was “very proud” to have his song sampled “literally
sixty years after I recorded it”. Lehrer went on to describe his official
response to the request to use his song: “As sole copyright owner of 'The Old
Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my
regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
“Fun”
is a word he often uses, and we see why. It’s an interesting choice of a word
for a man who purported to believe that people mess up just about everything
they touch, but he made his own place in that world and wasn’t obsessed with
what others did, mostly using it as material for comedy.
What
is Lehrer’s rank among American composers? High, I think, because of his
lyrical and melodic skill and his unstoppable sense of humor. There are things,
we should note, that he does not attempt. For example, there are no love songs
in his work, and remarkably little about sex. “I Got It From Agnes” is about as
close as that gets, and only inferentially:
She then gave it to Daniel,
Whose spaniel has it now.
Our dentist even got it,
And we’re still wondering how.
Lehrer
cast a cold eye on romance, patriotism, religion, many things that we hold dear
or claim to. That’s what comedians do – they disrupt our pretentions. When
armed with weapons of music and lyrics, they are all the more potent. Thanks to
Tom Lehrer for keeping us alert, and for helping us to laugh.
And we mustn’t forget the song about the Boy Scouts, which
got Lehrer in a bit of
trouble during a tour to Australia in 1960:
Be prepared!
That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed
Be prepared!
And be clean in word and deed
Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price
Be prepared!
And be careful not to do your good deeds
When there's no one watching you
If you're looking for adventure of a new and
different kind
And you come across a Girl Scout who is
similarly inclined
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be
scared
Be prepared!
* *
* *
“TOM LEHRER, 97,
SATIRIST WHOSE
PEPPY MELODIES LEAD
DARK VERSE, DIES”
by Richard Severo and
Peter Keepnews
[Above,
I embedded a link to an obituary of Tom Lehrer in Kirk Woodward’s profile of
the comic songwriter. I used the notice
from Variety,
the renowned daily entertainment newspaper, because I think coverage if Lehrer’s
death in a show business publication would be apt. Since, however, Kirk specifically mentions
the New York Times obit further down in his article, and the notice is
particularly comprehensive, I decided to run it following Kirk’s report.
[The
obituary notice below appeared in the Times on 28 July 2025, in the front section.
It was also posted as “Tom
Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97” on the New
York Times website on 27 July and updated on 7 August. (Richard Severo, a New York Times
reporter from 1968 to 2006 and cowrote the Lehrer death notice, died in 2023,
two years before his subject. I’m sure ROTters
know how and why this happens in the newspaper business, but if anyone doesn’t,
check out “An
Obituary Written From Beyond the Grave? Not Quite.”)]
A
mathematician by training, he acquired a devoted following with songs that set
sardonic lyrics to music that was often maddeningly cheerful.
Tom
Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs
made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in
all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in
Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.
His
death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.
Mr.
Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic,
sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on
piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers
purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.
But
his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart
he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.
He
stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and
then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour
in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and
even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
As
popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable
performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The
New York Times in
2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people
in the dark applauding.”
Mr.
Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the
tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old
Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the
Park.”
In “The
Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played
“painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be
Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for
your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”
Thomas
Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James
Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was
precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an
early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to
a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.
He
also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs,
“The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am
the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.”
(Years later “The Elements” would be performed by the young scientist played by
Jim Parsons on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”) [Actor Daniel Radcliffe
also sang the song on TV in 2010; here’s a video of the
performance.]
After
graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Mr. Lehrer went
to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree
in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then
pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. (He continued his
studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his Ph.D. thesis.)
While
at Harvard, Mr. Lehrer began to write songs for his own amusement and that of
his fellow students. He told his friends that the songs simply came to him and
that he wrote them down in just about the time it took him to brush his teeth,
but they quickly found an audience on campus. One of his earliest efforts,
written in 1945, was a parody of football songs called “Fight Fiercely,
Harvard,” in which he exhorted:
Fight,
fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we shall celebrate our victory?
We shall invite the whole team up for tea!
In
1952, as he looked forward to becoming a researcher for the Atomic Energy
Commission in Los Alamos, N.M., he wrote “The Wild
West Is Where I Want to Be,” whose lyrics suggested that he was not to
have a fruitful career in atomic research: “’Mid the yuccas and the
thistles/I’ll watch the guided missiles/While the old F.B.I. watches me.”
By
that time Mr. Lehrer had begun performing his songs in Cambridge, Mass. He did
not want to abandon research and teaching, but he saw the possibility of
combining the contemplative life with an entertainment career.
In
1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by
Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold
through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it
ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.
The
cover contained a drawing of Mr. Lehrer seated at the piano, with horns coming
out of his head and a devil’s tail emerging from his formal attire. (His
follow-up album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” used the same image.) The 11 songs lived
up to that image, among them “My Home Town” (where the “just plain folks” included
the pyromaniacal son of the mayor and the math teacher who sells dirty pictures
to children after school) and the necrophiliac ballad “I Hold Your
Hand in Mine.”
The
record’s success led to nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San
Francisco and Los Angeles. His performing career was interrupted by a two-year
Army hitch [1955-57]; when he returned to civilian life in 1957 he hit the road
again, giving concerts in Canada and overseas as well as in the United States.
In
1959, in an unusual move, he simultaneously released a new studio album, “More
of Tom Lehrer,” and a live album, “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” which
contained concert versions of the same songs. (He later also rerecorded the
songs from his first album in concert.) But after another year of touring, he
stopped performing and returned to the Harvard faculty.
In
1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the
short-lived satirical NBC television series [1963-65]. He did not appear on the
show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the
hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not
a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of
Warner Bros. Records.
His
new numbers, in which he focused on political and social issues, included “A Song for
World War III” (“So long, Mom/I’m off to drop the bomb”), which was
sung on “That Was the Week That Was” by Steve Allen [1921-2000; television and
radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer, and actor; in 1954 became
the first host of The Tonight Show, the first late-night television talk
show], and “Wernher von Braun,” about the German scientist [1912-77]
who designed weapons for the Nazis and later worked for NASA: “‘Once the
rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That’s not my department,’ says
Wernher von Braun.”
The
album also contained what may have been the most controversial song Mr. Lehrer
ever wrote: “The Vatican Rag,” his response to the Second Vatican Council’s [1962-65]
attempt to, in his words, “make the church more commercial.” The lyrics begin:
First
you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!
The
song was condemned by clergymen and school administrators. When Channel 13 [WNDT
until 1970, when it became WNET], the New York public television station,
played it as part of a [1967] fund-raising drive, the station received hundreds
of calls and letters of protest.
Mr.
Lehrer gave up performing again after a concert in Copenhagen in September
1967. This time he stuck to his decision. The rest was almost, but not quite,
silence.
His
last sustained burst of songwriting came in 1971, when he contributed “Silent
E” and other educational ditties to the PBS children’s series “The Electric
Company.” The next year he performed at a rally for the presidential campaign
of Senator George S. McGovern , [1922-2012; politician, diplomat, and historian; served
as a representative (1957-61)
and three-term senator from South Dakota (1963-81), and was the Democratic
Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election]. But there were
no more nightclub or concert performances, and no more albums.
By
1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard
Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut
down on the junk mail,” he said.)
A
new generation was introduced to the Lehrer songbook in 1980 when the British
impresario Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of his
songs, in London. The show was a hit there and was later produced in New York [Village
Gate (Off-Broadway), 1981-82], Washington [Kreeger Theatre (Arena Stage), 1982],
Dublin [Gates Theatre, 1981] and elsewhere.
With
characteristic self-deprecation, Mr. Lehrer attributed the show’s success to a
shortage of new songwriters. “It was inevitable,” he said, “that someone would
peer into the almost empty barrel and notice me down there.”
When
“Tomfoolery” played at the Village Gate in New York in 1981, Mr. Lehrer
explained to The Times why he had stopped writing. “The Vietnam War is what
changed it,” he said. “Everybody got earnest. My purpose was to make people
laugh and not applaud. If the audience applauds, they’re just showing they
agree with me.” On another occasion he famously offered another explanation:
“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger [1923-2023; German-born diplomat
and political scientist; United States Secretary of State: 1973-77 and National
Security Advisor: 1969-75 under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President
of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of
the United States: 1974-77)] was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize” [1977].
In
October 2020, Mr. Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this
website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be
downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further
permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else” — in other words,
that he was relinquishing the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies
of those few that used his words but someone else’s music.
He
expanded on, and formalized, this announcement two
years later, stating among other things that “permission is hereby granted to
anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this
music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or
distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” Adding
that he planned to shut down his website “in the not too distant future,” he
concluded: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help
yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” (His
website, and the notice, were still online at his death [and still yet at
this posting].)
It
was a highly unusual move, Abby North, the chief executive of a music rights
management company [North Music Group], told the public radio show “Marketplace”
[airs on many public radio stations during the last segment of the NPR program Morning
Edition], because for many songwriters, royalties “have been sustaining
multiple families for multiple generations.”
Mr.
Lehrer divided his time for many years between Cambridge, where he taught at
both Harvard and M.I.T., and Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on mathematics
and musical theater at the University of California from 1972 to 2001.
When
a fan once asked Mr. Lehrer if he had ever married or had
children, he replied, “Not guilty on both counts.” He leaves no immediate
survivors.
Reflecting
on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to
keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at
which time I will of course move to California full time.”
[If
I had to pick a favorite Tom Lehrer song, it’d be a hard assignment. “Be Prepared” tickles me endlessly—I was a Boy
Scout before I was in high school, though I doubt that’s why the song gets me—and
“The Vatican Rag” makes me laugh—maybe because I’m not Catholic.
[But
if I were forced to make a choice, sort of like Stephen Colbert’s question on
his “Colbert Questionert,” except restricted here to “You get one Tom Lehrer song
to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?" As Colbert might explain, “It’s not that it’s
playing in your head endlessly, or on a loop. It’s just that whenever you choose to listen
to Lehrer’s music for the rest of your life, that’s the only song you’ll hear.”
[In
that
case, I’d have to choose “Alma” (1965).
The only reason I can figure for that is that its references are so
obscure—how many people recognize the names Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Walter Gropius
(1883-1969), and Franz Werfel (1890-1945) off the tops of their heads? (Well, maybe Mahler--if you’re into classical
music.)
[Then,
the rhymes are sooo . . . I don’t know—surprising. A little forced, perhaps—pairing “Alma” with “embalma,”
for example (though I love “Bauhaus” and “chow house”!)—but very chuckleworthy.
It’s just not anything anyone—well, me, anyway—would imagine. Not even from Tom Lehrer.
[Just
for my own amusement, then, here are the lyrics:
The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well
Once you picked her up on your antenna
You’d never be free of her spell
Her lovers were many and varied
From the day she began her beguine
There were three famous ones whom she married
And God knows how many between
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?
The first one she married was Mahler
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav
And each time he saw her he’d holler
“Ach, dot is de fräulein I must have”
Their marriage, however, was murder
He’d scream to the heavens above
“I’m writing ‘Das Lied von der Erde’
Und she only wants to make love”
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz
While married to Gus, she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar
But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only came home now and then
She said, “What am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again”
Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Though you didn’t even use Ponds
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz
While married to Walt she’d met Werfel
And he too was caught in her net
He married her, but he was carefell
’Cause Alma was no Bernadette
And that is the story of Alma
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live
Alma, tell us
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter
You never did falter
With Gustav and Walter and Franz
[Just for the record, Alma
Mahler-Werfel was born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler (1879, in Vienna – 1964,
in New York City). She was married to composer
Gustav Mahler from 1902 to 1911, architect Walter Gropius from 1915 to 1920, and
novelist and playwright Franz Werfel from 1929 to 1945.
[Richard Severo was a science
journalist who wrote for the New York Times from 1968 to 2006. During that time, he won a George Polk Award
from Long Island University in 1975, as well as a Meyer “Mike” Berger Award
from the Columbia School of Journalism.
[Peter Keepnews,
formerly of the New
York Post, Soho
Weekly News, and Jazz Magazine, is a veteran music journalist and an
editor at the Times.
[Alex Traub contributed
reporting.]
